Category: American Way of Life - The Greanville Post

by Solomon Comissiong

A mythology of lies was built around Barack Obama, even before he walked into the White House. He got a peace prize for no good reason — and then made war against at least seven countries. Obama “even joked about the use of predator drones at a White House Correspondents Dinner.” Obamites cried when he gave his last speech, “yet can find little reason to shed tears over the masses of civilians who were destroyed as a result of Obama’s policies.”

“Barack Obama is set to be the latest installment of a president whose nefarious legacy will be glossed over or taught in some kind of twisted revisionist fashion.”

United States President Barack Obama will soon officially exit the White House, after amassing an imperialist track record that would make any warmonger blush. During his eight-year tenure as Commander in Chief, Barack Obama has bombed seven different countries. He has also executed countless drone attacks that have taken countless civilian lives in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Barack Obama has ordered extrajudicial executions of American citizens throughout the globe, including one of a 15-year-old boy. However as nefarious and destructive as his presidential legacy is, he continues to command the unconditional support of masses of mindless supporters.

Supporters of Barack Obama, and liberals in general, are disingenuous frauds. They had no issues protesting the likes of the amoral warmongering George W. Bush or the racist xenophobe, Donald J. Trump, however when it comes to Barack Obama they can find no reason to protest his mass murdering escapades. Obama supporters were recently nostalgic and teary eyed after he gave his last major speech as president of the United States, yet can find little reason to shed tears over the masses of civilians who were destroyed directly as a result of Obama’s policies. Where were the emotions and tears when men, women and children were getting blown to bits by USA drone attacks, indiscriminate air strikes and bombs?

“MLK spoke out courageously against imperialism, white supremacy, the military industrial complex and capitalism.”

As another Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has just passed, please take time to meticulously study and reflect upon his entire life and legacy. In doing so, you may find meaningful inspiration to strengthen your conviction to social justice and peace. Do what you can to prevent his legacy from being further tarnished and obfuscated. MLK spoke out courageously against imperialism, white supremacy, the military industrial complex and capitalism (and much more).

“Americans are well trained, like programmable robots, not to feel any kind of emotion for those who have perished due to US military escapades.” There is clearly something extremely wrong and backwards in regard to the overall culture of US society. Many Americans protest Trump, however they never protested Obama’s vicious (but underhanded) imperialism. They protest Trump but never protested Hillary Clinton’s record of death and destruction by way of war in Libya and Syria (and Honduras and other long-suffering places).

It is safe to assume that MLK would have denounced any warmongering US president, even Obama. Yes, even Obama — who is a devote warmonger and imperialist. When one honestly examines his track record, it is riddled with undeniable cold hard facts. During the last couple of years alone his administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs [3]. These bombs killed a great many innocent civilians. Barack Obama even joked [4] about the use of predator drones at a White House Correspondents Dinner. This is beyond sadistic and twisted, yet in the backwards society of the US, people laugh along with the jokes, not once thinking about those whose lives were destroyed by way of those drone strikes. Many Americans are well trained, like programmable robots, not to feel any kind of emotion for those who have perished due to US military escapades.

Like many previous US presidents, Barack Obama has committed heinous human rights violations [5] and war crimes. However, his actions are ignored or considered excusable. The media and his cultish supporters are responsible for this. They choose not to give a damn about his policies (especially foreign policy). They made the decision to get caught up in superficiality. And they choose to make excuses for his reprehensible actions, although they regularly spoke out against George Bush’s policies. United States society is a bizarre place where slave-owning presidents, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, are celebrated. It is place where Ronald Reagan is often referred to as “The Great Communicator” instead of the “The Evil Mass Murderer.” And now Barack Obama is set to be the latest installment of a president whose nefarious legacy will be glossed over or taught in some kind of twisted revisionist fashion.

“Americans are well trained, like programmable robots, not to feel any kind of emotion for those who have perished due to US military escapades.”

There is something extremely wrong and backwards in regard to the overall culture of US society. Many Americans protest Trump, however they never protested Obama’s imperialism. They protest Trump but never protested Hillary Clinton’s record of death and destruction by way of war in Libya and Syria (and Honduras and other long-suffering places).

Those who protested the racist and xenophobic Trump, but not Obama or Clinton, are nothing more that disingenuous frauds and amoral cowards. However if you have a track record of protesting the imperialist Democrats and Republicans, you have a duty to continue to do it. If you don’t’ have this kind of track record; it is long past due that you start. Your words and actions will go a long way in educating others, even if it’s only a small minority that listens. It only takes a critical mass of consistent and committed people to make positive, sizable and tangible differences! Keep fighting for justice! If for no one else, do it for future generations who deserve a better society. Let your actions be the moral compass that guides them to that brighter future.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/obama%27s_destructive_legacy

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/obama%27s_destructive_legacy

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obama-administration

[3] http://%20https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy

[4] http://%20https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52JVljZW_cw

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZjXquDoxWA

[6] http://www.solomoncomissiong.com

[7] http://www.yourworldnews.org

[8] mailto:solo@yourworldnews.org

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Solomon Comissiong (www.solomoncomissiong.com [6]) is an educator, community activist, author, and Founder of the Your World News Media Collective (www.yourworldnews.org [7]). Mr. Comissiong is also a founding member of the Pan-African collective for Advocacy & Action. Solomon is the author of A Hip Hop Activist Speaks Out on Social Issues. Solomon is also the writer and producer of the documentary, Hip Hop, White Supremacy & Capitalism: Why Corporations Infiltrated RAP Music. He can be reached at: solo@yourworldnews.org [8]

By LUCIANA BOHNE

“Do you think we would be better off under Hillary or Trump,” asked the members of my Writing Group, at the meeting first Sunday in October.

“It’s not an either/or matter. I can’t give you a short answer.”

But afterwards, I wrote the answer here.

We have political democracy in America but scarce economic democracy. We have the political structures of democracy, but they teeter on foundations of exceptions. These check the advance of genuine democracy from below. We have democracy for the few and exclusion for the many. We have socialism for capital and capitalism for the rest. Every political right or freedom, moreover, is provisional. It comes with clauses of exception in small print or loopholes accrued over time. These preserve the state’s privilege to rescind them.

We have a democracy that contradicted itself from inception. It professed that “all men” were born equal, except those un-people who were legalized chattel—the property of men who bought them. This infant democracy, too, restricted the vote to men of property, encouraging ownership by theft of lands belonging to those other un-people—the native nations. That pattern of dispossession is evident today in the systematic violence against black youth. Black men are 6.6 percent of the population; they are 40 percent of 2.3 million of the incarcerated population, up from 375.000 in 1970. Six million citizens who have served their sentences are not allowed to vote.

The nature of our democracy

Property, not the demos, was engineered as the nec plus ultra of vital interests into the DNA of our constitutional machinery. Ostracism waved the semaphore on top of the shining hill of white post-colonial America. We seized, we owned, we profited, or we didn’t belong to the utopian enclave—the exalted den of zealous profiteers.

The ethic of greed and competition hardly insures social harmony. It is secured by buying public opinion. This means building a superstructure of ideological control. It means conditioning the public to adopt as their own the values and interests of the ruling elite. Therefore, the inculcated belief in the sanctity of property induces the ruled to believe that “the pursuit of happiness” consists in the acquisition of material goods—not, as understood by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the acquisition of the right to self-development, denied under the rigid social structures of feudalism.

The notion of property in capitalism predicates exploitation. It is not the guarantee of public welfare, harmony, and security. Property is the mother of racism, war, genocide, and inhumanity. We have, in our huckster democracy, good citizens who oppose war and racism, but opposing wars and racism in a property-obsessed state is like opposing the fire in Hell. Fire is the nature of Hell as property is the nature of our state. We must call for abolishing Hell.

“It is quite obvious,” wrote the young Frederick Engels in his first published book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, observing the emerging democracy of the industrial age in England, “that all legislation is calculated to protect those that possess property against those who do not.”

The swindle

When you have political democracy without economic justice, you have form without content. Karl Marx, who with Engels studied the emerging constitutions of liberal Europe, especially after the revolutions of 1848-49, wrote it all up in The Holy Family, and called this vested, partial democracy, “the democratic swindle.” He considered the US the model country of this “swindle,” the most democratic in constitutional form, the most effective for regulating the people’s passions within the limits of ruling class interests, insuring social peace in the vise of its brutal liberal embrace.

To be sure our constitution was the most democratic of the emerging liberal age.

In Europe, for example, nascent liberal constitutions were blighted by a reactionary impulse toward the preservation of degrees of despotism. Not ours. In writing, we repudiated kings and despots. We were “we the people.” We ruled. We had graduated from subjects to citizens.

It was a brilliant hoax, the illusion of power resting with the people. “For god’s sake, let them vote; don’t be afraid of elections,” whispered the US elites to their fretful counterparts in Europe in the late 19^th century. “Let them warrant their own subjection with the vote. Let them think they rule the state. You will have social harmony at a cheaper rate than you do now with the expenditures on dungeons and gendarmes.”

Europe listened because the socialist movements took off in massive earnest at the end of the 19^th century, demanding social and economic justice. They listened because international socialism threatened to unite in common struggle against imperialism the subject peoples of the colonies with the subject masses in the imperial motherland. The laboring masses of Europe realized that if the sun never set on the British Empire, it never rose on British slums.

To reassert social harmony, concessions were made. Then the socialist movement was wiped out in the First World War, both a class and an inter-imperialist war. The rising tide of consciousness of general oppression subsided and crashed on the mud of Flanders and the trenches of the Western front. On the Eastern front, the tide held, wiped out autocracy in Russia, and began the experiment of people’s rule. One thing the imperialists did not take into account when they egged on the people of each nation to kill the people of the other was the reflection that wars are the crucible of revolution. If there is a silver lining in the ongoing butchery of today’s wars by the West against post-independence colonial places it is the hope that history will repeat itself in a blow-back of global revulsion and revolt.

Neoliberalism sets in

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince 1945, the American two-party system succeeded brilliantly in maintaining a controlled social order, playing a game of pretend conservative and progressive opposition. In reality, the game was played to confine the people to a political closet of stiflingly narrow proportions, a suffocating space of political choices, in which all the people were expected to do was face-off over whatever trivial or expense-free concession the state threw at one group or the other. Keep them agitated but leashed; give them the impression that in dissenting and debating, they live in a free society. This is how the rulers liked it: the people divided but hemmed in. True, occasionally the people broke out and took to the streets, but minimal concessions were made, and they returned to the closet to squabble over their merits or demerits.

In the 1970s, the rulers made a momentous decision. They noted that the rate of profit on investments within the welfare state was flat. They noted that maintaining the industrial economy had too many overhead costs. They noted that concessions made to insure social harmony had accumulated to a tipping point at which the freedom of capital to expand was at risk. They decided to take it all back: the industrial investment in the country’s continuing development; the progress of workers’ rights; the cost of social services; the regulations on banking; the restrictions on financial schemes and gambles. In short, they wanted the pre-Great Depression undisciplined Wall Street casino back.

They knew they were embarking on social warfare. They knew the people would suffer, but they trusted that the ravages of neoliberal scorched-earth policies would take time to bite home. The predictable revolt against pauperization could be delayed by retribalizing society into identity groups, each seeking the attention of the state to a single issue. We became a nation of Balkanized minorities because the state knew that our strength—our only weapon—was united in numbers. Atomized, we could be dealt with

When in the late 1970s, the steel industry left Pittsburgh for Brazil, though the rate of profit was 12%, the area was economically devastated. Teaching composition 90 miles north of Pittsburgh, I read essays in the 1980s from students at the working-class public university where I taught. The essays told heart-wrenching stories of family’s distress—steelworker fathers who lost their jobs, drank, quarreled with wives, divorced.

More painful to read, however, were the causes the students attributed to the insecurity of their young lives. They cited too stringent environmental laws; excessive corporate taxation; union greed. They surrendered their reason to the passion of resentment which the Republican Party stoked using the cudgel of racism. They supposed democracy had gone too far with Affirmative Action, favoring one group over another. They agreed that “government was too big” and welfare too lavish. The philistines in the Republican Party compensated their misguided trust with pedantic lucubrations on family and religious values, the “sanctity of life,” the sobriety of the death penalty as social discipline—measures that did not deplete the defense budget or the corporate subsidies by a single cent. The prison complex became a lucrative site for private investment and exploitation—the Workhouse of the British 19^th century.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, preached racial tolerance but passed draconian laws incarcerating the most vulnerable—the young, the poor, and disproportionately black. They “reformed” welfare, and led resentful whites to believe that uppity blacks were losing their handouts. In reality, most people on welfare were poor whites. The Democratic Party launched the discourse of multiculturalism, ghettoizing social groups by single-issue politics, which further fractured social cohesion, solidarity, and cooperation.

What lay buried under the discourses of values and identity was class, the unmentionable, the proscribed. The American working class ceased to exist as a linguistic entity in public and intellectual discourse. It ceased to exist politically, because when language dies, the people’s history, culture, and consciousness die, too. So the Democrats passed NAFTA and CAFTA, acts of economic aggression against labor at home and abroad. They repealed the Glass-Steagall Act to throw the door open to untrammeled financial license, which gave us the crash of 2007-8, when the bullshit of both parties finally hit the fan. The hitherto divided and apathetic polity broke out in a chorus of irate rage against “the rich.” Here was the political backwardness of the American people, so assiduously cultivated by both parties, awakening to a perception of class as a social relation of unequal power in society.

Social harmony breaks down

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this year’s presidential electoral campaign, we’ve seen the grip of control by both parties loosening. The halcyon days of class conciliation and of cooperation by the working population with the interests of economic elites have clearly come to some sort of beginning of the end. The somnambulist voters who had formerly lined up behind the candidate selected by their respective parties —Republicans to the fake right, Democrats to the fake left—suddenly woke up, broke out of their apathy in disorderly, riotous, unexpected disobedience.

Twelve million voters joined the campaign of “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders, who offered himself as the candidate of democratic socialism. 13.3 million became partisans of the billionaire real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump, the upstart rogue candidate of the Republican Party. In reality, neither candidate acknowledged the magnitude of the problem of world capitalism in crisis, the root cause of the return to rapacious capitalism, advanced by neoliberalism. Neither grasped or confessed to grasp that neoliberalism was a necessity for capitalism’s survival. Thus, both proposed to set the clock back to a time when the American people prospered, Sanders to the economics of the New Deal; Trump to the days of industrial Fordism, two options specifically trashed by neoliberal economics. Hillary Clinton, as Bill Clinton’s partner in neoliberal ideology and practice, does understand that neoliberalism is the last battle for the global hegemony of international capital. That is why she’s the candidate of the Bush Neo-Cons.

But the people, driven by their increasingly dire material conditions, had finally had enough. The Obama years had put paid to any hope for change—to any lingering trust in the promises of both parties. The wars continued and intensified, raising the defense budget to over 600 billion dollars; the military-industrial complex garnered riches to raise the envy of Croesus; surveillance intensified; the banks recovered and profited, while the people chewed on the crumbs of austerity; the export of capital rushed out of a country badly in need of investments; the job market offered precarious, insecure, and underpaid work; the anti-labor, anti-sovereignty international trade deals pressed on. Corruption. Police violence. Scapegoating immigrants—and massive deportations. Media control. Lies. Belligerence. Destructive foreign policy: military aggression and regime change. Shredding of international law and treaties. Fake humanitarianism. Loss of the “good opinion of the world,” which the Constitution so anxiously bid the people of the United States to cultivate. In lieu of good neighbors, our rulers aspire to become abusive landlords of the globe.

The people are ashamed. In some corner of their darkening conscience, they are ashamed of their country. Increasing poverty strips them of their dignity. They must feel shame for the conditions of their private and national lives. And that is not good for the rulers: shame is an emotion where revolutionary consciousness begins. Who can live long without self-respect before resorting to revolt or succumbing to loathing humanity so as to displace self-loathing, as fascists do? Above all, who can live long in a society where endemic violence is a clear symptom of its doleful absence of love?

Conclusion

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]rump or Hillary? Wrong question. Rather, we need to realize that in so far as it is the choice the leaders propose, it is a trap, which now we cannot escape but from which we can take instruction for the future. In the liberal culture in which we have all been educated—Republicans or Democrats– we are used to looking for saviors from above. We attach ourselves to the powerful. We look upward for emancipation, but radical change and democratization come from below. That’s where the hardness is, but that’s what scares us. We are soft because we don’t know our own strength, and as long as we don’t know it, we are subjects–not citizens.

We should see in both the Trump and the Sanders partisan defections from the mainstream parties the glimmer of a potential—in fact, a necessity– of organizing a party of the people. We could even call it Party of the Basket of Deplorables, for if we exclude the “messy masses” (the term Marx and Engels used, to mock the contempt in which they were held by the arrogant elite), we admit that democracy hasn’t a prayer. They are “messed up,” but are they to blame, who have ceased to matter, or even exist, on the front of the class war that has been launched against democracy—that is, against us all?

The color line must be erased. That is an imperative for unity. In America, racism is the endemic, the recurring plague. It is the root of our political disunity. So that is the first task: educate it out of existence. Engels, who shared his life with Mary Burns, Irish Republican radical, well understood the racism against the Irish pervading the English working class. This was no mere psychological disorder. It arose because the manufacturers of the Midlands imported Irish labor as scabs to break strikes. Nevertheless he saw in the English working class the strength required for a social revolution:

“England exhibits the noteworthy fact that the lower a class stands in society and the more ‘uneducated’ it is in the usual sense of the word, the closer is its relation to progress and the greater is its future.”

I have tried “to patiently explain”—Lenin’s maxim—and, in the length of the explanation that is not even a “straight” answer, I may have exhausted the reader’s patience, but it is important to know, that if we vote for either of the two candidates, we do so without the illusion that elections give us power. If we vote for the “lesser evil” let it be for the last time, for evil it will be.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu

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REMEMBER: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

By Lorna Salzman

THIS IS A PRESCIENT POST THAT SHOULD BE READ AGAIN, NOW THAT FAR TOO MANY DEMOCRATS ARE GETTING READY TO VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON, LIKE OBAMA, A CRIMINAL CORPORATE SHILL AND A PHONY. (FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2009).

==THIS IS A REPOST==

The Obama mirage should be a lesson for those who are quick to fall in love with phonies. (Are you listening Daily Kos?)

THOSE OF YOU WHO FOLLOWED the 2004 presidential campaign of Ralph Nader (sadly limited to very few states) probably got his VP candidate Matt Gonzalez’ memo on Obama’s voting record in Illinois and in the US Senate. I myself circulated it on two occasions to my lists.

Anyone who read it instantly recognized that Obama was being groomed by the pro-capitalist, pro-Wall St.-pro-corporate Democratic Party, which squelched Nader as it had in 2000 and 1966 by co-opting and bribing members of the US Green Party who nominated Nader in 2000, and by conducting a vile campaign of vicious lies about Nader.

Their fears were that Nader could not only take away votes from Gore and Kerry but from Democrats running for congress at the same time.

These efforts were aided by the paleoliberal media like The Nation (via Eric Alterman) and its co-conspirators across the narrow liberal spectrum. One big player in this was Code Pink Mafia headliner Medea Benjamin, who started a website for green Progressive Democrats for America, to wean greens away from Nader. Another was former Nader associate Ben Manski of the Wisconsin Green Party, who secretly manipulated the US Green Party National Committee’s executive committee to work against Nader quietly. A wealthy midwest pair of Democrats rewarded Manski handsomely with a quarter of a million dollars after the election, enabling him to set up a “Liberty Foundation”.

…

Members of the Democratic Party defend their party literally to the death. They consistently refuse to hold their congressional representatives accountable for anything except possibly abortion rights. They close their eyes and sign on the dotted line for any and all Democratic Party policies and legislation, and warn of the potential victory of the “lesser of two evils” if anyone dares to assert that she owns her own vote and has the right to cast it as she pleases and prefers, thank you very much, to vote for a candidate she actually likes. Since neither Gore nor Kerry were very likable, defections from the Dems were taken seriously, hence the assault on Nader.

–

The knee-jerk liberal vote for a black Democratic candidate was pre ordained, though his margin of about four percentage points in the election was not huge.

But for the next presidential election, and for the congressional elections before that, nervousness on the part of Democrats is going to increase. The Afghanistan war is of course the crux of it for most liberals, though for environmentalists and health care advocates, those issues will also loom large and any failure will be remembered and loom large.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e know Obama is selling out on health care and energy. Duh. No other scenario could have been taken seriously by anyone knowing the issues and watching what was going on in congress, and knowing how the stealthy corrupt Democrats operate. But Afghanistan, and its periphery Pakistan, are going to seal Obama’s fate. I am not placing bets on what he will do because there are plenty of internal fights going on in Washington. The question is this: will Obama throw liberals under the bus on the war issue, as he is doing on health care and energy?

In other words, will he take a calculated risk that he can insure sufficient campaign money and propaganda from corporations, Wall St., energy industry, neo-liberals, centrists, and just plain knee-jerk Democratic Party enrolees who would vote for the party against their own interests in exactly the same way that middle America votes Republican against their own interests? Will these be enough (with of course the requisite mass media endorsements) to insure him the nomination and then, biggest question of all, the election? This calculation has already begun; it is well established that his deal with the insurance companies (a phony one) to limit Rx prices was a quid pro quo: don’t support Republicans in the next election. (There is no price reduction, just a reduction in projected future profits). You have to admire the brains and cojones of Rahm Emmanuel in dreaming that one up. No question that Emmanuel is bad for the Jews.

We can influence his decision in a big way if we circulate articles like the one below, if we refuse to knuckle under to the Dems, if we refuse to accept what that party hands us every four years, if we go public, no holds barred, and if we say clearly, with some red cheeks, that we have been deceived, slickly, continually, but brilliantly, because the Democrats had the wiles to nominate a candidate of color whose skin color gave off one message, while his actual politics and connections gave off another. Wink, wink, Wall St. You guys know I am with you all the way. Read my lips. No new financial regulations. No injury to the health care industry and insurance companies. No threat to WTO, cap and trade energy brokers, coal companies.

Let’s be blunt. Obama is an unmitigated disaster. As Bill Maher famously said, all he’s accomplished since last January is to buy a puppy. (Maher ended up becoming a big supporter of Obama, to thew tune of millions of dollars and plenty of free TV boosterism.—Ed) But let’s not just gripe. Let’s organize. Let’s send a clear unqualified message to the Democrats: we don’t like you, we won’t vote for you, and we won’t vote for Obama next time.

Whether there is the will or energy to form a third party or anti DP voting bloc remains to be seen. But the first step is resistance and delegitimization of the two party system. As my bumper sticker says:

—Lorna Salzman

About the author
Salzman is a well known environmentalist , Green Party activist, and hell-raiser. The only fly in the ointment (A BIG FLY) is that she does support Israel rather unquestioningly, and she's not exactly a fan of Medea Benjamin, Code Pink's firebrand, whom we respect for her activism and sheer courage.

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=By= Allen Ruff Interviews Henry A. Giroux

“Gun Culture,” bu Christopher Dombres. (CC BY 2.0)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]llen Ruff interviews Henry A. Giroux on the manifestations and mechanisms of the addiction to violence in the United States. Dr. Giroux responds in his typical sweeping style integrating everything from disentitlement and the capitalist system, to the concentration of wealth and the politics of fear. He also veers off into state terrorism and how that plays into the addiction to violence.

Henry A. Giroux

Contributing Editor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

Source: WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio, Madison, WI.

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Hegemonic Lies

=By= F. William Engdahl

piggy bank

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]lightly more than seven decades ago, when the United Nations was officially founded in San Francisco, there was no question in the world about who was the Great Power, the World Hegemon. Today the situation has radically altered to the severe disadvantage of Washington and her ability to dictate terms to the rest of the world in economics, politics, and the greatly-misused expression “human rights and democracy-building.” That disadvantage may, ironically, be a blessing in disguise for us all.

In 1945, the United States Federal Reserve controlled the overwhelming majority of the world’s monetary gold. As war approached in Europe in 1939, European gold flooded into the United States for safety. In 1935 US official gold reserves were valued at just over $9 billion. By 1940 after the onset of war in Europe, it had leapt to $20 billion. As desperate European countries sought to finance their war effort, their gold went to the United States to purchase essential goods. By the time of the June 1944 international monetary conference at Bretton Woods, the United States Federal Reserve controlled fully 70% of world monetary gold, a staggering advantage in what was then a Bretton Woods Gold Exchange System with the US dollar at its heart. That wasn’t even calculating the captured gold of the defeated Axis powers of Germany or Japan, where exact facts and data are buried in layers of deception and rumor to this day.

To grasp the full dimension of the internal crisis and foreign policy dilemmas facing Washington today, it’s useful to go back to the nature of the immediate postwar “triumphalism” of US policy circles in the wake of their emergence from the war.

An ‘American Empire’ emerges

One influential geopolitical thinker of the postwar American Century, sometimes referred to as “the first Cold Warrior,” was James Burnham. During the war he had been one of Wild Bill Donovan’s US Government intelligence operatives in the pre-CIA intelligence operation called Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Burnham was one of many American Trotskyist Marxists recruited by the US intelligence. After the war, Burnham, swung from far left to far right, much as fellow former Trotskyist, Irving Kristol, the so-called Godfather of the neo-cons. Burnham together with William F. Buckley, Jr. founded the arch-conservative National Review to propagate Cold War anti-Soviet missives and pro-free market propaganda, invariably serving the foreign policy agenda of the CIA and State Department.

In 1947 Burnham wrote a major paean to America’s new world power titled The Struggle for the World. The book was adapted from a Top Secret OSS memo Burnham had prepared for the US Delegation to Yalta about the Soviet geopolitical strategy in 1944.

Burnham described in the most positive terms what he called, “an American Empire which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.” This is what Time-Life magazine founder, Henry Luce in his 1941 essay termed, “The American Century.”

Burnham’s vision and recommendations for his American world control were stark and unequivocal:

The United States cannot within the allotted time win the leadership of a viable world political order merely by appeals to rational conviction…Power must be there, with the known readiness to use it, whether in the indirect form of paralyzing economic sanctions, or in the direct explosion of bombs. As the ultimate reserve in the power series there would be the monopoly control of atomic weapons.

The reference to “direct explosion of bombs” from Burnham’s 1944 draft was a presaging of the August 1945 decision by President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, not to secure Japanese surrender which was already clear, but, rather to show the Soviet Union, as well as Western Europe, which power would rule the postwar world. The American Century was to be a “no nonsense” enterprise. As Burnham put it, “Independence and freedom are, after all, abstractions.”

Within that American-controlled economic space, encompassing more than 560 million people, lay a vast potential market beyond even the enormous expanse of the prewar British Empire. The United States, a mere two years into its postwar ambitions, held extraordinary power over much of the world in an informal economic empire. It had done so by using the mechanisms of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and World Bank, through its control of broad western European economic policy via the Marshall Plan and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), through the role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, and the heart of world finance, and above all, through the major New York banks of the Wall Street money cartel and their allied civil servants in Washington at the Federal Reserve and US Treasury Department.

In 1948 George Kennan, architect of US Cold War Soviet “Containment” policy, noted in an internal US State Department memo the essence of the mentality of those special interests around the brothers Rockefeller and the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), who were busy then defining that emerging American informal empire. Kennan’s memo outlined the postwar agenda of the US power establishment very succinctly:

…[W]e have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Kennan outlined the real nature of post-war US policies. Kennan was coldly honest and realistic about the true postwar goal of the US establishment. It was US domination of the world, or at least as much of it as it could seize and hold onto in 1948. That was the CFR’s proposed Grand Area.

Since 1945 the United States has formally been involved as combatant in twenty two wars, major and minor, from Korea to Vietnam, from Grenada and Panama to Syria and Libya, wars all to grab and hold that global empire.

Now, its domestic economy a hollowed-out shell, its transportation infrastructure in horrendous decline, its skilled labor force increasingly non-existent, its university engineering and science students mostly from abroad–mainly China and India–the United States of America is in the throes of a terminal decline, a decline caused by no one but her own people who tolerated the looting and destruction of a once-beautiful nation by a greedy, power-addicted cabal of bad people with names like Rockefeller, Gates, Russell, DuPont, Buffett and others whose names are hardly known to the broad public.

The crisis that the USA faces today as World Hegemon is the fact the nation has become bankrupt, morally, spiritually, intellectually and economically, in an eerie manner much as the British Empire after onset of their Great Depression of 1873.

A few basic indicators says volumes about the rapidly-growing limits to America’s global power projection and why Washington’s “bully” tactics are being increasingly scorned by the rest of the world.

USA Debt then and now

Today, unlike at the start of the 1930s Great Depression, the Federal Government in Washington must carry a staggering debt level to finance its ever-more impotent attempts to hold onto its global control. At the end of September, 2016 the total combined Federal, state and municipal US debt will likely pass the staggering amount of $ 22.4 trillion, with $19.3 trillion of it from the Federal government. If private corporate and household debt is added, today Americans owe a staggering total of $60 trillion. Forty years ago in 1974 total debt– the combination of government, business, mortgage, and consumer debt–was $2.2 trillion. About 50% of that Federal debt today is held by foreign countries, most by China and Japan, Russia and EU central banks.

This Federal Reserve graph of total USA debt, public and private shows clearly how and when the United States began its now precipitous decline as a Great Power

The only comparable time when US Federal debt as a share of GDP was anywhere near that of today was in 1946 at the end of the Second World War when Debt-to-GDP topped 119%. In 2014 total public state, federal and local US debt topped 120% of GDP.

The difference between 1946 and 2016 lies not in comparing the raw numbers. Then the US was the victor dictating terms to the vanquished. In 1946 Washington was at the center of global power. The US dollar was in demand everywhere, “as good as gold.” US industry was the world leader in innovation and technological efficiency. Detroit was the global symbol for making superb, affordable cars, and more of them than any other nation. US steel output was unexcelled. Research at US universities was unparalleled, aided by an influx of European and other war refugee scientists such as Albert Einstein. Most of the so-called “free world” rushed under the US nuclear umbrella known as NATO. They were to pay a hefty price for that umbrella.

Faking the numbers is no recovery…

Today, some 45 years after President Nixon unilaterally abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty and declared the Federal Reserve would no longer buy US dollars held abroad for gold, the real US economy is a shambles. From time to time I’ve noted the absurd and politically-motivated lies that pass for “official US Government economic statistics.” It’s gotten successively worse since the first lying tricks ordered by President Lyndon Johnson to hide the soaring US debt during the Vietnam War era in the late 1960’s.

According to the widely-respected calculations by economist John Williams at the Shadow Government Statistics site, actual US unemployment in November 2015 was 22.9%, when we include the “long-term discouraged workers”–those who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That’s far from the Obama Labor Department fantasy level of 5% unemployed. One-fifth of the workforce jobless is a level previously reached over the past century only during the 1930’s Great Depression.

John Williams’ adjusted unemployment estimates explain the otherwise curious data released, without elaboration, by the same US Government, on the number of “working-age Americans not working.” Today, officially, more than 100 million Americans over the age of 16 are not working. That ain’t because they are sitting on the beach clipping coupons on their zero-interest-rate bonds. It’s because there are no jobs for them; there is no economic future for them in today’s America. Many young people even begin to look at fighting Washington’s wars as an option that at least gives a steady paycheck. This in fact is turning the United States into a Sparta, a war nation that thrives on blood. Not healthy.

Worst hit are the young just graduating college or high school, where last year of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs. As one economist, Stephen Moore, noted, “for every three Americans added to the working age population age 16 and older, only one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.” Under Labor Department definitions those “not looking” because they have given up, do not exist. Veeeeery clever, Bureau of Labor Statistics!

America’s Homeless Crisis

Germany and Sweden have their refugee crisis, the direct result of a US-instigated series of wars going from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and now to Syria. The United States, however, has a human crisis of a quite different nature–soaring numbers of homeless.

As the number of permanent unemployed rises across America, much as during the Great Depression, today the number of cities where homelessness has reached crisis proportions is exploding.

In the once-thriving California city, Los Angeles, a 50-block area of downtown nick-named Skid Row is described as “the worst man-made disaster in the US.” More recently, Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington, as well as the entire state of Hawaii have become the latest to take drastic emergency measures to try to deal with spreading homeless populations.

In addition, the nation’s capital, Washington DC, as well as 22 other cities, are experiencing dramatic rises in homeless. In Washington, DC, the number of homeless rose by 28 percent and the number of homeless families went up by 60 percent in the past year. Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and San Francisco, California are as well suffering from the same problem.

Wrong National Priorities

The root of the crisis lies in a nation that is being led by corrupt Washington Presidents, Generals, Congressmen who prostitute themselves to a seemingly endless hog trough of corruption. None excels in this official corruption more than the US Pentagon and its incestuous role with the corrupt military industrial complex.

Russia’s recent military engagement in Syria has raised eyebrows the world over, including in Washington, at the level of precision and sophistication the newly-reorganized Russian military has demonstrated. Weapon after weapon the Russian air forces have deployed seem to outclass its US counterparts. In one area, however, the US has no equal. That is in military contracting corruption.

In 2014 the US Armed Forces paper, Stars and Stripes, reported that, “Nearly three decades after US taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.”

They continued, “In other words, the US military has turned into a black hole, into which billions of taxpayer dollars have disappeared, without any clear evidence on how, when, and to whom the money went. The fact is that the US government now subcontracts almost everything out to private companies (who collectively spend billions lobbying Congress and funding political campaigns), and this is particularly true when it comes to the Pentagon.”

Austrian journalist, Einar Schlereth, in a recent analysis published by Sputnik News, comparing the Russian state military industry system to the private US one, notes that, “Russia’s system of military spending is the diametric opposite of America’s. While the United States has privatized their military industry, in Russia it is in state hands. All profits from arms sales go to the Russian government, not to the makers or the multinationals. The arms manufacturers are [effectively] part of the government.”

“Just like in the US, there is no financial accounting of their operations, but there are financial reports reviewed each year by the defense minister and, moreover, by the president and the prime minister –i.e. by people who are responsible to the electorate, and not only to the aristocracy of large shareholders.”

Recent estimates by the American Society of Civil Engineers put America’s national infrastructure deficit in excess of $3.6 trillions required for building or replacing antiquated water systems, electricity power lines, highways, rail lines, sewer systems. That includes more than 10% of all bridges defective, one third of national highways, airports and runways. In this situation, it would be interesting to see the voter reaction were Donald Trump or any US Presidential candidate to have the courage or sanity to suggest a shift in national economic priorities away from making wars with Russia, China, Syria and turning those over-budget Pentagon “swords” into plowshares. We should have done it in 1990 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist as an adversary.

Such are the travails of a bankrupt hegemon today.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Source
Article: New Eastern Outlook
Lead Graphic: “Break the Bank” by TaxRebate.org.uk. (CC BY 2.0)

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As Obama Exits the White House, Never Forget His Destructive Imperialist Legacy

by Solomon Comissiong

“Barack Obama is set to be the latest installment of a president whose nefarious legacy will be glossed over or taught in some kind of twisted revisionist fashion.”

“MLK spoke out courageously against imperialism, white supremacy, the military industrial complex and capitalism.”

“Americans are well trained, like programmable robots, not to feel any kind of emotion for those who have perished due to US military escapades.”

The Democratic Swindle: Hillary or Trump?

Enough of this lesser evilism crap

Henry Giroux and “America’s Addiction to Violence”

Travails of a Bankrupt Hegemon

An ‘American Empire’ emerges

USA Debt then and now

Faking the numbers is no recovery…

America’s Homeless Crisis

Wrong National Priorities